bitmonkey Wrote: > However, if the SB's internal DAC is really *THAT* good, I guess I'd be > happy using it as an analogue source. Part of this is probably > disbelief that a £200 component's DAC can really be better than the > ring DAC in my not-so-old £1200 CD player, but if it's true then I > guess I ought to be happy I can upgrade for such small cost. I can't say whether it's a better DAC, but my bet is there's a high chance that ripped CDs in lossless (e.g. Flac) format played through the SB will sound better than the £1200 CD player.
Why? Not because of the DAC but because the CD player, though digital, has variables that affect the play back because it's reading a stream of data off a CD spinning away with vibrations and all sorts. A CD may not play perfectly or the same every time (arguably). In many ways a CD player is analogue in behaviour. However when ripping a CD using something like EAC to a lossless format you get an exact copy with all the errors ironed out and playing the lossless file is exact every time. Coupled with sending the file through TCP/IP to the SB you don't get jitter issues delivering the file to the DAC, so it's pretty much as perfect a delivery of digital data to the DAC as you can get. If you were to output SP/DIF from the SB you may be introducing jitter again, though the quality of an external DAC might outweigh that. -- deadkenny ------------------------------------------------------------------------ deadkenny's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6722 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=26548 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
